The Little Friend by Donna Tartt. Alfred A. Knopf. 555 pages. $26.00.
Before I read Donna Tartt's second and latest novel, I read her first one, and I must admit I did so with my dukes up. The Secret History, from 1992, generated enough hot air to melt the Arctic Circle, let alone to invite skepticism.
Hear ye the blurbs. New York Newsday found it as "stony and chilling as any Greek tragedian ever plumbed." The Village Voice said Tartt has "a stunning command of the lyrical," and The Boston Globe likewise noted her "beautiful language," which among her many other talents "make her debut by far the most interesting work yet from her generation." Several reviewers picked up on the generational theme. The Miami Herald proclaimed that young Miss Tartt "has the ability to leave her literary contemporaries standing in the road," and Glamour dubbed her as "her generation's Edgar Allan Poe." Oddest of the blurbs was the one from the Philadelphia Inquirer, for whom the book proved "a journey backward to the fierce and heady friendships of our school days, when all of us believed in our power to conjure up divinity and be forgiven any sin."
That sounds like a pretty good description of what the reviewers themselves did. No question, the book — about a group of Greek students at a small eastern college who become a little too involved in a pagan ritual, and eventually wind up killing one of their own — is a page-turner of sorts. Personally, I put it down midway through, lost no sleep for two weeks wondering what would happen, and didn't pick it up again until I had read another book, twice. Still, it is thick with both motivation and moral sense, and in its own dim way it manages to suck some commercial juice from the Dostoyevskian terrors it conjures up, of doing the unthinkable and getting away with it.
And yet, and this has something to do with why I was glad to take a break from it, it's a distracting read almost from the beginning. Mere pages in, that "lyrical," "beautiful" voice begins to curdle. First of all, there's the problem with the narrator, who is not a convincing male; he talks like a girl who has read too much Keats. There's nothing hairy about him. I likewise easily tired of Tartt's campus-life fetishism, and her superficial student types, few of whom could be distinguished from each other. I found the student's teacher believable, but not the rest of the adults in the book; Tartt is at her lamest at the dead guy's funeral, when she tries to skewer a lot of all-too-familiar Southern California types.
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I'll agree there were structural problems with The Secret History. And that The Little Friend is a better book. But Tartt does deliver on her commitment: she delivers thick plot with good prose, rather than writing as if those two things are mutual antagonists.